Freezing Buns and Damn Good Advice

So I froze my buns off to bring a new video to you, and it has some killer content that you need to see if you’re writing grants.

I didn’t want to bring you a plain old boring video. Nope. It would go against my advice for your grants. It would go against what I stand for.

Now I admit. I’ve screwed that up in the past. I’ve on occasion let things go on for too long and be a bit boring. But you better believe it that when I write a grant proposal, I’m editing it over and over again to make sure that it is crisp, clear, compelling, and snappy.

Why crisp, clear and compelling?

That’s what I did for this video, too. It’s such an important message that I wanted to maximize the chances that you will watch it, and then share it with your friends & colleagues.

So, I went out on a cold, rainy, 40F day, in my kayak, getting flipped multiple times with my head dunked under the 45F water… so that we could get some compelling footage for the film. After 25 minutes I could barely operate my hands, and had to quit. It took me hours and a warm bath to heat up again… but it was worth it.

See, of that 25 minutes of footage, only ~30 seconds was used in the video. That’s all it needed.

About your grants…

That holds another learning lesson for your grant writing. Many people feel compelled to “tell the whole story” of the project, and it ends up being a long and rather tedious read. When your reviewer tunes out, you’re done for.

I just read yesterday that Jerry Seinfeld, arguably the world’s best comedian, will work for a month or more to develop only two minutes of really good live content.

Really… do what Jerry does… do what I did in this film… edit mercilessly until only the most compelling core of your story remains in your grant.

Be a harsh editor, who cuts out all the unnecessary fat, and leaves in only the core, the juicy stuff…

You may wonder, what is the juicy stuff?

The good news is that I’ve been working on a formula for this, and I share it with you in the very same video I mentioned above! It’s called, affectionately, the “Objection Obliterator” – and I even have a worksheet to help you implement it.

Once you start thinking in terms of “how do I handle deep, CORE objections to my proposal,” it clarifies your thinking about which facts you need to include, and which you can leave out.

This solves the problem of overly dense, hard to read proposals that turn off the reviewer.